Remembering Jerusalem: Imagination, Memory, and the City

Network coordinator: Hannah Boast (York)

Principal Investigator: Dr Helen Smith (York), Co-Investigator: Dr Anna Bernard (King’s)

Lead Members: Dr Michele Campopiano (York) and Dr Jim Watt (York)

http://jerusalems.wordpress.com/ Imagining-jerusalem@york.ac.uk

@jerusalems1099 #Jerusalemconf

Perhaps the world’s most iconic city, Jerusalem exists both as a physical space and as a site of memory, ideas, and re-memberings. In art, literature, film, and history writing; in acts of public and private worship; and in communities across the globe, memories of Jerusalem have, for centuries, been created, invoked, and relived. This cross-period, interdisciplinary conference presents an international range of speakers, from academics to architects, artists, and curators, addressing the topic of Jerusalem and Memory, c. 1099 to the Present Day.

The conference will take place in two venues on the King’s College London Strand Campus: The King’s Building and the Macadam Building. The King’s Building is a white, grand-looking nineteenth-century building, and the Macadam Building is a newer, rectangular building. The map below gives the location of both buildings. The entrance to the King’s Building is via the main campus entrance on the Strand. The best entrance to Tutu’s – where conference registration will take place on the first day – is via the Macadam Building entrance of Surrey Street.

On the map, A (red) is the King’s Building, and L (light blue, bottom right) is the Macadam Building. You can view a larger version of this map online. The closest tube station is Temple, on the Circle and District Lines. This station is visible on the map, on the bottom right. For directions to the campus from specific points in London, we recommend using the Transport for London Journey Planner: http://journeyplanner.tfl.gov.uk/

Directions to the Campus From Conference Hotels

Many of you will be staying in the Tavistock Hotel, which is just over a mile away from the campus. To walk to the campus from this hotel, turn right out of the hotel, then take the first right (at the East edge of Tavistock Square), then right into Southampton Row. Keep walking down past Russell Square (a park), then past High Holborn Station, where the road becomes Kingsway. Continue walking until you get to a big curving road, which is Aldwych. Across from this is King’s College, which you get to by turning left with the flow of traffic into Aldwych. Cross at pedestrian lights and turn right into the Strand, where you can either take the main entrance into the King’s Building (for most rooms), or turn onto Surrey Street (for Tutu’s).

Routes from the other hotels are similar: turn right out of the Royal National Hotel to get onto Southampton Row, then follow the directions above. Turn left out of the President Hotel, then left again onto Southampton Row.

Rooms

Most panels will be in rooms in the King’s Building. These include the River Room, Small Committee Room (SCR/K0.31), Council Room (K2.29), seminar room K 1.27, the Entrance Hall, and the Anatomy Museum. The Council Room and River Room are on the second floor. The SCR and Entrance Hall are on the ground floor, and K 1.27 is on the first floor. The Anatomy Museum is on the sixth floor.

In the Macadam Building, we will be using the former students’ union venue, Tutu’s. This building is best entered from Surrey Street, a side street off The Strand that can be seen on the map above, to the right of the image of the main campus. Tutu’s is on the fourth floor of the building. Signs and student helpers will be present to help with getting between the two buildings.

Floor plans for the different levels of the King’s Building can be found here.

Detailed information about the accessibility of both buildings can be found on the DisabledGo website, here and here. If you have specific accessibility requirements, please let us know and we will do our best to accommodate them.

The conference dinner will take place on the 6^th November at Tas, a nearby Turkish restaurant. It will include a selection of mezes to share, a main course, and half a bottle of wine per person. The restaurant is halal certified, but please note that it does not have kosher certification. Tas is around a twenty minute walk from the King’s Building, and we will walk or take taxis as needed after the wine reception. The address is 22 Bloomsbury Street, WC1B 3QJ.

Curators at the British Library have put together a Show and Tell visit for 'Remembering Jerusalem' conference delegates, during which participants will be able to view items in the Library's collection relating to Jerusalem.

The items will include Hebrew, Islamic and Persian books and manuscripts, and a selection of rare maps. There will also be a talk from the Endangered Archives team, who have recently digitised thousands of photographs of the Ottoman Middle East from the Maison Bonfils archive, as well as documents from the historical periodical collection of the Al Aqsa Mosque Library, East Jerusalem.

Places on this visit are strictly limited, and need to be booked in advance.

Delegates attending the visit are expected to make their own way to the Library. The visit will begin at 11.30, but we will meet at the main reception desk at the Library at 11.15.

The British Library is in-between the Euston and King’s Cross Stations, or a half-hour walk from the conference venues down Kingsway and Southampton Row, past the conference hotels, until you reach a big main road, Euston Road, and turn right. The Library is a short distance from this junction, on the left.

Please ensure that you have already left coats and other belongings (large bags, umbrellas, food and drink) in the lockers or cloakroom on the lower ground floor before reporting to reception.

Hannah: 07743399136

Anna: 07709124088

King’s Building Reception: 02078365454

Chaired by Dr Michele Campopiano (York)

Chaired by Dr Helen Smith (York)

The paper examines the Christian elements inside the Muslim Sanctuary, consisting of "mahd Isa"/cradle of Jesus and "mihrab Maryam"/oratory of Mary. These were mentioned in the writings of jurists and Sufis since the 10th century, but have received no attention from scholars. The paper traces the allusions to the cradle and the oratory in Arabic pilgrimage accounts and descriptions of Jerusalem and discusses their significance in the history of Islamic worship.

17.15-18.15: Professor Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths) – Title TBC

Chaired by Dr Anna Bernard (KCL)

Department of English

Arizona State University, United States

bambler@asu.edu

Jerusalem that begins readers with their limited, mortal optic; it depicts one side of the exterior of the city. An 8-stanza written depiction of the city, however, allows the reader to imagine what illustration cannot convey: an intimate memory of the city, one that realizes its divinity not only with description, but through form of language. The dreamer recounts the physical qualities of the city, shown to him by God in an extra-spatial fashion: from a stationary position outside of the city, he sees both external walls on the far side as well as the city’s internal structures. When he fleshes out this textual image with what happens in the city, moreover, the poet realizes the divinity of the city by using grammar to remove it from time: shifting from the descriptive past tense of the previous seven stanzas into a present tense with a gnomic aspect, the poet, through the voice of the dreamer, casts the events he describes occurring in the city as a-temporal, ontological facts. Rather than moments transpiring in time, they are events that simply are. Understanding the means by which medieval Christians re-membered the New Jerusalem, sometimes even down to the grammatical level, may help us better apprehend the place the corporeal Jerusalem occupied in their imaginations. The phenomenological lines along which medievals plotted their lives transcended temporality itself: their ultimate destination, they hoped, was the New Jerusalem.